Multi-Unit UES Mansion May Become Single-Family Home

A landmarked mega-mansion at 51-53 E. 73rd St., which currently hosts 13 residential apartments and five office spaces, may soon become a single-family home.

The palatial 12,321-square-foot building, located between Park and Madison avenues, was auctioned off for $25 million during bankruptcy proceedings back in January 2022.

As first reported by Crain’s New York Business, the conversion plans were filed by Eric Goodman—who is a managing partner at the Long Island-based private equity firm Goodman Capital—under the aegis of a limited liability company, Chai 73. Chai 73 was the entity that took over the building during the bankruptcy auction. Crain’s notes that the last time one of the residential units was on the market was in 2019, when a three-bedroom was listed on StreetEasy for a hefty rent of $17,500 a month.

The building, which was built by John G. Prague in 1885 and renovated in 1943, was landmarked in 1982. Rumors have long flown that Harry Belafonte and Grace Kelly, two megastars of the mid-20th century, quietly shacked up there at one point; the New York Post has written numerous articles calling such claims a “hoax” and “fake,” although some have been hesitant to issue a final word on the matter.

One 2021 New York Post article points out that the building was once owned by Paul Ender, a real estate magnate who may have started the rumors of the townhouse’s celebrity connections, at least according to the building’s broker as of 2013; the mortgage on the building had ballooned to nearly $15 million by his death in 2015. His widow, Simone Ender, defaulted on the mortgage shortly thereafter—leading to the eventual bankruptcy auction.

The broker who asserted that Ender had started the celebrity rumors himself was Sergei Millian, who was initially fingered as a prominent source for the Steele dossier, an infamously lurid piece of opposition research on then-President Donald Trump that was released in 2017. The dossier’s claims of sexual blackmail pertaining to Trump (think “pee tape”) have since been disavowed as fabrications by Democratic Party officials.

However, by 2022, the Washington Post pointedly retracted previous mentions of Millian—a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce—as a source for the dossier, calling its previous reporting incorrect. The paper’s then-editor, Sally Buzbee, wrote that “[the] Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story,” meaning that they no longer were identifying Millian as a source for the factually challenged dossier, possibly (slightly) boosting his credibility.

When it came to the celebrity rumors related to the East 73rd Street mansion, Millian explained to the New York Post that he was merely repeating what Ender had told him. Such rumors have had salacious staying power because Kelly and Belafonte were married to other people, and never admitted to having an affair with each other during their lifetimes.